Better Product Managers, and Product Management

About a month ago I was getting ready to send out an email blast asking for feedback when I took a moment to stop and think.

I asked myself, If I got this in my inbox, how likely would I be to reply to it? and immediately answered, Not very.

The problem with online tools is that they make it incredibly easy to solve problems, but in doing so, they sometimes lead you to solve the wrong problem efficiently.

With customer communication, the problem is not “contact customers and get it over with”.

Contacting your customer – whether it’s via email, phone, or carrier pigeon – is a means to an end: listening to what they have to say.

(more…)

Clearly, we weren’t in agreement. But was it because we actually disagreed, or because we weren’t aligned on exactly what the situation was?

This scenario happens a lot with offshoring and virtual offices, and it’s why many companies have thrown up their hands and brought teams back in-house.

There, when confusion arises, you can immediately have a face-to-face conversation, maybe in front of a whiteboard. Discuss until you both get it. Simple, right?

Yesterday, I was having one of those “we are just not in sync” situations.  Except the coworker in question was 2,000 miles away. No face-to-face option, no whiteboard option.  Instead, we both had to battle through a long IM conversation, punctuated by “I sent you a quick sketch – is this closer to what you mean” interjections.

It was painful.  (Well, not so much for me – but almost certainly for him.)  But it forced us to be incredibly precise, and to keep confirming what the other was saying. “So you mean we’d default to this option and then continue to that screen?”  “No, let me rephrase…”

By the end of the conversation we were finally aligned.  But I couldn’t help but think that we would’ve given up sooner if we were both in the same location.  Why? Because proximity makes you lazy.

When you start getting frustrated, it’s easy to find an excuse to get out of there so you can go roll your eyes in private.  After all,  you both know that your colleague is just across the room.

But you may not be at your desk next time a question arises. Or, your coworker may feel self-conscious – jeez, she spent a half-hour explaining this to me, I feel stupid not “getting it”.  Maybe I should just figure it out on my own.

In the book Made to Stick, there’s an experiment described where one person tapped out a song in their head and the other had to guess what song it was.

The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2… When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

I’d guess it has to do with proximity, too.  ‘He’s right there’, you think, ‘how on earth can he not get it?’

I’m certainly guilty of this.  If you look at my sent-mail folder, you’ll see some embarrassingly bad emails I’ve sent to local coworkers.  Things like “did you finish that doc for that meeting today?” Which doc? Which meeting? Could I be any more context-free?

We expect someone farther away to have more difficulty understanding what we mean.  So we make the kind of affordances that we ought to be doing all the time, for all people.

Next time you’re sending an email, explaining a concept, or scheduling a meeting, try pretending that your audience is a thousand miles away:

• Summarize what you’re trying to achieve
• State your assumptions (and ask that they be challenged if they’re wrong)
• Make a hypothesis (“I think this means X – is that correct?” is much more helpful than “I don’t understand this”)
• Restate the other person’s words (“So you’re saying Y and Z – is that correct?”)
• Finish with a clearly-stated bullet point summary of what you’ve agreed upon/decided

The extra five to ten minutes you invest in clarity will save you hours later on.

I’m taking the ProBlogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge, and the first day’s assignment is: write an elevator pitch for your blog. I’d actually been meaning to update the description in my sidebar, so it’s a good poke.

The concept of the “elevator pitch” may be a little bit cliched, but: let’s face it, people have limited attention spans.  If you want people to associate something with your product, your company, or you, it has to be short and easy to understand.

Here’s the updated pitch for this blog:

The experience IS your product.

To make customers happy and to be competitive, you’ve got to constantly work on describing, planning, iterating, researching, building, supporting, iterating, testing, and promoting it. This blog can help.

There are a lot of commas.  That’s deliberate.  People who have met me know that I get enthusiastic over all the details of building great products.  It’s not just requirements or markets, it’s understanding people and how they work and what they need.  I love talking about all of that.

Cindy’s tips for writing your pitch:

1) If you’re not sure how to articulate what your blog is about, run your URL through a tag-cloud generator.  It’ll show the words that come up over and over again. (For me: users, customer, launch, like)

2) Start by talking, not by typing.  You’ll use more natural language if you speak, wave your hands, etc.  It’s easier to take a good verbal snippet and make it a little more formal, than to try and force some life back into jargon-heavy marketing text.

I guess MediaPost does.  This morning’s Email Insider newsletter talked about a panel from last week’s Email Insider summit.  Apparently the email marketing industry just made the astounding discovery that both moms (implied: the technologically un-savvy) and college students judge emails based on their usefulness, not on whether or not they opted in.

Neither group distinguished between permission-based marketing and spam if they didn’t want the email.

Let me repeat that, because it’s so obvious that you may not have gotten it.  If your email is not useful, customers do not say “Oh, this email isn’t very useful, but I did sign up for it, so that’s okay.”

Are you ready for the best part?  Email Insider says:

“What’s clear from all of this is that many consumers don’t know how to use email properly-which is to say that they are a detriment to themselves and to email marketers.”

Wow.  Insulting your customers. (I had no idea there was a “right” and a “wrong” way to use email.)  Calling them a detriment to themselves and you.  (Yeah, in this economy, I can see how you’d have so many customers that they’d be a burden to you.)

Look – your customers not doing what you want is not their problem.  It’s your problem.

People drive demand, they pull out the wallets, they buy and use and pretty much insure you have a job (or don’t).   If people find your interface confusing, clarify it.  If people want to use your product in a different way, embrace it.

If people don’t find your product useful, BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD.

The real lesson here is that customers don’t want email they don’t find useful.  The answer isn’t to educate them, it’s to educate yourself.  Create value, or get out of their inboxes.  Your customers know who the real “detriment” is.